Taste Kid’s Journey

I’ve implemented a new feature that I hope will prove to be helpful: each time you search for something, just underneath the big search input, you’ll find a small “Remember” link - press it, and Emmy will remember your query (you can tell her to forget it afterwards).

This way, if you have entered many bands, movies and books (in one search), to better describe your taste and to get more recommendations, you won’t have to re-type all your favourite stuff next time you visit Emmy. It’s like a very straightforward profile-saving function. One thing though, Emmy is able to remember just one of your searches at a time, so telling her to “remember” something will make her “forget” about any previous remembered searches. I hope you’ll like it :)

A couple of days ago I have uploaded a series of updates that I have been working on for a while.

The most important update probably is Emmy’s knowledge base itself, that I have rebuilt from scratch. It is definitely more comprehensive and accurate now, and I truly hope this reflects in the quality of Emmy’s recommendations. I am aware that some of the users may still be disappointed with her results, but I am making efforts to improve her ability to provide relevant recommendations to more and more different inquiries.

Besides giving better suggestions, Emmy is now able to provide further information for the majority of the stuff she recommends. Until this update, only a limited number of resources had a Wikipedia description available. Now, for almost all the bands, movies, and, for the first time, for books also, Emmy is happy to present you the begging of the Wikipedia article of that particular resource. This way, I hope you will be able to make a better first impression on the things suggested to you.

Some less visible updates have been made also. For example, you can now search for up to 20 items (given as input to Emmy), separated by commas. Up until now, the limit was 10 items, and the few of you who actually tried to give her 10 bands, movies and/or books to better describe your taste, would have probably experienced a longer execution time. Now, Emmy is able to grasp, process and make her recommendations upon your input much faster, and for double to number of resources given as input.

Another less visible update is that now Emmy, besides improving her “Did you mean” feature, has also learned some common spelling mistakes and abbreviations.

To give you just a few examples: beatles, bjork, alanis morriset, linkinpark, rhcp, amélie, lotr, soad, beethoven.

A useful update is that you can now specify the type of your input, and also request a type for the recommended items. There are cases when the same name can stand for a band name and for a movie title in the same time, for example. Now, if Emmy assumes wrong about what you are trying to tell her that you like, you can mention her the type by using the “band:”, “movie:” or “book:” operators.

For example: band:underworld, movie:harry potter, book:trainspotting.

Also, you can specify what type of stuff you want to receive as recommendations, that is, band and artists, movies or books. This can be useful in many cases, interesting, and fun to play with sometimes.

For example: the beatles//movies, fight club//music, pulp fiction//books.

There is still a lot of work to do in order to make Emmy wise enough to provide the vast majority of her users with interesting, relevant recommendations they haven’t heard of before, but I hope these updates will prove to be a step forward in accomplishing this mission.

Searching for TasteKid on Google no longer triggers a “Did you mean: Taste Kid” message (with the blank space between “taste” and “kid”).

Fight Club has been the most searched movie on TasteKid in the last month. It seems many people struggle to hide the Tyler Durden in them :)

A couple of days ago, an article featuring TasteKid made it up to Digg’s main page. This triggered an “emergency landing” on Delicious’s main page, too. Around the same time, this happen. Then this. Then, others followed.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

About a week ago I’ve started experimenting with Google AdSense and the Amazon Affiliate program. Today the experiment ends, and I have decided to turn off, at least for now, both programs.

TasteKid is an unusual website from Google’s point of view. The AdSense targeting algorithms focus on analyzing the content of the page on which the ads are delivered, but TasteKid’s content is just a list of seemingly random internal links (the suggested items). Despite this, Google has managed to provide related ads in some cases (e.g.: concert tickets for one of the suggested bands), but, unfortunately, many times it fails to come up with relevant ads. This is hardly Google’s fault, as it only tries to match TasteKid’s content with items from its pool of ads, and not so many advertisers set as keywords for their ads band names or movie titles.

The consequence of non-relevant ads being displayed is a very low click through rate, that not only reflects negatively on AdSense earning, but also suggests that users are not interested in these ads. This furthermore has a negative impact on user experience, like any other element on a web page that is displayed despite the fact the user is not interested in it. In conclusion, I have decided that, at least for now, TasteKid is better off AdSense.

As for the Amazon Affiliate program, things are a little bit different. The ads were presented within the tooltip (the one that appears for each resource) and the advertised product was a direct result of the parameters sent to Amazon (i.e. band name or movie title). This meant that, for known resources (and the resources for which the ads triggered were quite popular, because I was displaying them only for resources on which Emmy has a Wikipedia description), the relevancy of the advertised product was pretty good. Even so, few users seemed interested in following these ads. The reason for this is that it’s quite unlikely for somebody to rush and actually buy through Amazon a whole album of a band that they’ve just discovered – they would probably first try to learn more about the band, or listen to more songs performed by that particular band that may be freely available on the web. As for movies, I think this option is actually quite useful, but, despite this, the overall usefulness of this whole Amazon Affiliate program isn’t very clear to me just yet. I have decided to stop this program together with Google AdSense for now.

Nevertheless, this was an interesting experience for me, that I will probably use in the future, when I will be more preoccupied on monetizing TasteKid’s traffic while maintaining a pleasant user experience.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine recommended me this documentary. I didn’t paid it too much attention at the time, but now, if I come to think, it may have something to do with the more profound causes of the financial crises that we are going through right now. If so, the huge capital infusions that governments all over the world are performing in order to “save” economies it’s only a way of postponing and aggravating the inevitable outcome.

The Macbook family just got rejuvenated today. I won’t get into technical details, for there are much more specialized publications to cover those aspects. But how about these two titles covering the same story: Apple revamps the MacBook line: Sleeker, sexier, slightly more expensive and It’s a Laptop. Those Come Out Every Day. Each of these articles leaves the reader with a completely different impression on this event.

Of course, there have always been different, many times opposed points of view on the same subject, but this is just another example that makes me wonder to which extent we base our opinions and decisions on other people’s views, on trends and on peer factors. It makes me think about manipulation, it makes me think about marketing and fashion, it makes me think about true values often buried deep underneath a pile of intentionally or unintentionally well-constructed lies. But maybe I’m just thinking too much.

Getting Real is one of the best resources out there for all the people participating in designing, implementing, launching, marketing and pretty much everything related to a new web-based product or service.

The book (which is free to read online and is divided in small, easy to grasp chapters) dates back to 2006, but it is probably  more actual now than ever. To give just one quote:

“The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back — and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

These days it doesn’t take much to get rolling. Hardware is cheap and plenty of great infrastructure software is open source and free. And passion doesn’t come with a price tag.”

37signals has become a cult company, and, although some may consider they’ve broken their own rules when they took external funding, many of their advices and philosophies are valuable pieces of Internet business wisdom.